The first collection

New Orleans, 1900

Every photograph, with everything the record says about it.

A line of loaded mule wagons on the street beside the French Market in New Orleans, with a man standing on an empty flatbed dray at the right and painted shopfront signs for hardware, stoves, ship chandlery and groceries on the buildings behind.

Plate 1

The Old French Market, New Orleans, c. 1890

Place
French Market, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Made
1880 to 1897
Photographer
Attributed to William Henry Jackson (1843 to 1942)
Negative
Detroit Publishing Co. no. 8113, glass dry plate, 5 x 7 in.
Held by
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection
Rights
No known restrictions on publication

What the frame tells us

Painted street numbers 227 and 229 belong to the numbering the city abandoned in the early 1890s, and place the shopfronts in what is now the 900 block of Decatur Street. A board for Salatich & Baccich, a partnership that had ended by the middle of the decade, points to the earlier part of the Library's bracket.

Nine numbered sources on the print's page.

Read the recordAll the plates

How we know

Every claim is visible in the plate or carries a source you can follow.

Before a photograph goes any further, one of us writes a dossier on it: the archive's record, the photographer if one was named, the date the archive gives, and then the plate itself under magnification. The photographs in this collection were dated by their own painted numbers, missing wires and copyright marks.

  1. Detail: streetcars on the Canal Street neutral ground with no trolley wire above them
    Plate 3

    The missing wire dates the plate.

    The city's first electric streetcars ran in 1893. There is no wire above this track, so the view belongs to about 1890 to 1894, the last years of animal-powered cars on the neutral ground.

  2. Detail: the dash of streetcar 181 on Canal Street
    Plate 6

    The car has a number, and the number has a record.

    Car 181, built in St. Louis in 1899, read off the dash. A copyright cartouche in the same negative fixes the year at 1907.

  3. Detail: the inscription cut into the pedestal of the Jackson statue
    Plate 4

    An argument, cut into stone.

    The sentence on the pedestal was adapted from a Jackson toast on the order of General Benjamin Butler during the federal occupation, and the city had not settled the argument when this tourist view was made in 1900.

Where the record tells us what color something was, we follow it. Where it is silent, the color stays restrained, and we say so. What we cannot establish, we say we cannot establish.

The plates

New Orleans, 1900

Plates from the Detroit Publishing Company negatives at the Library of Congress, made in the city between the 1880s and 1907. Numbered in the order the photographs were made.

  1. Plate 1 A line of loaded mule wagons on the street beside the French Market in New Orleans, with a man standing on an empty flatbed dray at the right and painted shopfront signs for hardware, stoves, ship chandlery and groceries on the buildings behind.

    The Old French Market, New Orleans, c. 1890

    1880 to 1897The oldest market of its kind in the United States, fed by mule cart before most of the city was awake.     Opens October 30
  2. Plate 2 A cobbled New Orleans street restored in color, lined with iron-galleried buildings on the left and low Creole cottages on the right, closed at the far end by the trees of St. Anthony's Garden and the rear of the Cathedral of St. Louis.

    Orleans Street, New Orleans, c. 1890

    1880 to 1897In 1831 the city closed this section of Orleans Street for good.     Opens October 30
  3. Plate 3 Canal Street in New Orleans seen from the Clay monument, with three animal-powered streetcars standing on the neutral ground track and cast iron galleries fronting the stores along the right side of the street.

    Canal Street from the Clay Monument, New Orleans, c. 1890

    c. 1890 to 1894This view cannot be made today, because the monument came down in 1901.     Opens October 30
  4. Plate 4 A 1900 photograph of Jackson Square in New Orleans restored in color, showing Clark Mills' equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in front of the Cathedral of St. Louis, with the Cabildo to the left and the Presbytere to the right.

    Jackson Square, New Orleans, 1900

    1900A tourist view recorded an argument the city had not settled.     Opens October 30
  5. Plate 5 A 1900 photograph looking across the Mississippi River from the Algiers bank toward the New Orleans skyline, with St. Louis Cathedral at the center and a steam vessel and a partly demolished wharf in the foreground.

    The City from Algiers, New Orleans, 1900

    1900A wharf coming apart plank by plank, a year before a public board took the riverfront over and rebuilt it.     Opens October 30
  6. Plate 6 Three electric streetcars stand abreast on Canal Street in New Orleans in 1907, with pedestrians in the track and Godchaux's store under its canopy on the right.

    Canal Street at Godchaux's, New Orleans, 1907

    1907Car 181, built in St. Louis in 1899, outside a store whose family would leave this corner within a generation.     Opens October 30

Why we do this

The past was not black and white, and it was not empty.

The people in these frames were building the world we live in, in the ordinary way, by going to work. Their years survive on glass in public archives, catalogued and mostly unseen. We read those plates, check what they show against the record, and give them back their color, so that a street you walk every day comes back as a place where people lived.

A print from us is not a picture of a city. It is a piece of the record, with the story we could verify attached and an honest note of what remains unknown. That is what we mean by Past in Color, and it is the standard every print on this site is held to.

Past in Color, an independent studio

The first collection

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